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It’s no secret that writing articles is a great way to get backlinks to your blog. You write a simple 400-500 word article and submit it to sites like EzineArticles and GoArticles. You add a link back to your blog, either in the body of the article, or in the author biography below the article. Sometimes, and only sometimes, they article itself will rank well in the search engines and you can get a decent amount of traffic directly from the article but normally you are adding them just for link value.

There are some that say that you should submit your article to the hundreds of article directories available. More places the article is listed means more backlinks, right? There are even services that will save you the work and submit them to 200 directories for you for $25 or so.

Is it worth it to either pay for submission or to spend a few hours submitting them yourself?

In my opinion, no.

I’ve promoted a lot of blogs and other websites over the years but even when I’ve submitted the articles to 200+ directories I’ve ended up with very few additional backlinks reported by Google. Yahoo shows me the additional links sure, but does this help? Again, no, not in my experience. I’ve never noticed any increase in search engine ranking or traffic for those articles I’ve submitted to 200 directories. They rank exactly the same as those sites where I’ve only submitted the articles to two directories.

I suspect this is because Google is devaluing the links from all those copy-cat article directories. They are, after all, duplicate content.

My advice is to continue to use articles to gain backlinks, and any bonus traffic you might get, but only bother submitting to two or three directories.

I always use EzineArticles as the first submission. I have a platinum membership account there, so articles are reviewed and listed within 24 hours. I then modify the article slightly and submit it to GoArticles. I find that within a few days the article will appear on 20 or more sites as they scrape, I mean syndicate, Â content from these two sources.

I was about to stop using GoArticles due to the amount of spam articles that appeared there but they seem to have gotten their act together and instigated a better review system. The articles there nowadays are higher quality and seem to be syndicated widely.

It’s easy to rewrite one of you blog posts into article form and takes only a couple of minutes to submit.

Considering the time spent, your results will be far in excess of any other promotion technique.

I signed up with Blogburst the other day and this blog has been accepted for syndication.

In theory they syndicate your content to sites like USA Today and The Washington Post online editions.

I’m not holding my breath but I’ll let you know if it affects the number of visitors in any way.

How do you know when it’s time to stop blogging is the theme of this post from Lorelle on Wordpress.

On a similar topic, How to Kill Your Blog Succcessfuly from ProBlogger.

There was a post on the official Google webmaster blog this morning commenting on a change to their algorithm. Googlebombs are where a number of sites, usually blogs, use a specific and unrelated anchor text to try and get a site high on Google.

The best example of this was getting George Bush’s official White House page to rank #1 for the search term “miserable failure”. It held this spot for two years, even ranking high for the single word “failure”.

Not any more. They have changed their algorithm to prevent this. No specific details, of course, all they say is:

“By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web”

It will be interesting to see what other sites currently enjoying a high position in Google through heavy link campaigns this impacts. I’ve no doubt other sites using the same anchor text for all their links will be affected in spite of the official line:

“the impact of this new algorithm is very limited in scope and impact”

Another nail in the coffin for SEO link building campaigns perhaps.

This is a  question that often crops up.  Hourly? Daily?  Weekly? Monthly?

Before I answer the question, you need to consider what type of traffic you are targeting.  Are you looking for repeat visitors or are you looking for search engine traffic?  This makes a difference to the answer.

For repeat visitors, the long held mantra is that you post everyday.  The argument is that your readers will give up on visiting your site if they see no new posts for a few days.  Some hyperactive bloggers have taken this to heart and post a dozen times a day.  Some have done very well when they do this.  Robert Scoble has one of the more popular blogs and he posts several times a day.  Others burn out very quickly at the self-imposed workload.

With all of the Web 2.0 hype that surrounds us, it seems that we now have to build more of an interactive community which leads to more frequent posting and responses.  I was watching MyBlogLog yesterday and noticed the same person was visiting Blogging on Blogging at least once per hour for several hours.  I was tempted to send him a message or make a special post welcoming him, but never did.  Was he desperate for my next post or did he have no life?

I’m going to argue that posting frequency doesn’t matter as much as it used to.  The majority of readers of this blog, and most others,  now read posts through an RSS reader.  They are subscribed to my blog feed and whether I post once a day or once a month they will still see new posts.  If  I take a few days off, the traffic directly to this site drops, but then picks up again once I have daily posts.  Nobody unsubscribes from my feed because I don’t post for a few days. 

I personally subscribe to about 40 different blogs through Google Reader.  That takes up a lot of my reading time.  I recently unsubscribed from two blogs, not because they weren’t providing valuable content, but because there were just too many posts to read each day.  Even skimming the articles was too much work, so I just unsubscribed.   

More frequent posting can also lead to a reduction in quality.  Something worth reading takes time to write.  Time to research.  One person posting a dozen times a day doesn’t have time for quality posts.  Others only post once a week but when I see them on the feed reader I go to them first.  They are always quality posts worth savouring.

Ultimately it comes down to your schedule.  If you have time to post everyday, great.  If not, the worst that will happen is that you lose casual readers with short attention spans.

If your visitors come mostly from search engines there’s a different answer.  This answer is based on my own experience and observations.  I don’t have any SEO theories about why this work, but it does for me.

About two years ago I started a blog around the game Everquest which I was still playing at the time.  I posted religiously every day to the blog for about a month but its performance was less than spectacular.  I think it was getting around 50 or 60 visitors a day from the search engines.  The blog was buried somewhere about page 20 on Google for most of its keywords.  Since it was a lot of effort for very little return I slowed down the posting to once a week or so.  Not deliberately, it just happened.  Suddenly my traffic shot up to 300 to 400 a day and it started to bring in the cash on affiliate sales. It was around page 2 or 3 of Google.  

There could have been any number of explanations to this, from moving out of the Google sandbox, to a change in their algorithm.  Obviously I got excited by this and started posting once or twice a day.  Guess what?  The traffic dropped back down to 50 or 60 a day.  I lost interest thinking it was a fluke and posted less frequently.  Again it happened.  Back up went the traffic to 300 plus. 

The only thing that had changed was my posting frequency.  I experimented a bit over the next few months and found that I could maintain the traffic with a post every 3 or 4 days. 

Coincidence?  Perhaps.

I’ve tried this same technique over a number of other blogs that rely only on search engine traffic and there does seem to be a sweet-spot for posting frequency.  On some blogs it’s daily.  On others it’s every three days.  Others are fine with once a week.

As I say, there’s no scientific evidence to support this theory so try it at your own risk.

   

Here’s what Technorati thinks I’m worth according to this tool at Business Oportunities Weblog:

Here’s the latest value.

The tool works, I tried several other blogs and they are worth millions.  Problogger is worth $2,445,587.28 and even How to Make Fragrances which I only created last week is worth $564.54.

Looking for offers over 25 cents for this domain and contents…